Archive for the ‘satellites’ category: Page 40

Feb 21, 2016

TAQNIA and KACST signed an agreement on February 21, 2016, to form a joint venture that will be responsible for developing six or more sub-meter resolution imaging satellites.

KACST will construct, integrate, and launch the satellites, and it will own 50% of the satellites’ imaging capacity inside of KACST’s communication cone, which includes Saudi Arabia and the surrounding region. And, DigitalGlobe will have rights to the other 50% of the capacity inside this region and 100% of the satellites’ capacity outside of the region.

WESTMINSTER, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– DigitalGlobe, Inc. (NYSE: DGI), the global leader in earth imagery and information about our changing planet, today announced the formation of a joint venture with TAQNIA, a firm dedicated to accelerating technology development for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in partnership with KACST to develop a constellation of highly capable small imaging satellites to support the needs of customers around the world.

Feb 20, 2016

This week the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully launched a new space observatory designed to study black holes, dying stars and the history of galaxy clusters. The X-ray Astronomy Satellite, known as ASTRO-H, will be able to detect X-rays more than 10 times fainter than its telescope predecessor, Suzaku.

Feb 18, 2016

Nano Satellite could be interesting and even expanded upon especially as we look to expand the usage of Quantum Technology across various wireless devices in the future as well as microbot technology to enable connectivity to the cloud and other wireless devices.

The nano-satellite, which is among ISRO’s important missions, will monitor air pollutants that pollute cities including Delhi, Lucknow, Amritsar and Allahabad.

By 2019, three ViaSat satellites will dispatch a whopping one-terabit internet connection to obscure residential areas in the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. They will also provide connectivity to airplanes in flight and even maritime vessels in the middle of the oceans, which have always previously been drastically removed from anything approaching broadband.

Presently in development at Boeing, ViaSat’s three-satellite system will reportedly offer double the capacity of all the 400 communications satellites already in orbit around the Earth combined. It’s existing technology, just re-executed to be way more efficient.

Feb 13, 2016

GPS is an utterly pervasive and wonderful technology, but it’s increasingly not accurate enough for modern demands. Now a team of researchers can make it accurate right down to an inch.

Regular GPS registers your location and velocity by measuring the time it takes to receive signals from four or more satellites, that were sent into space by the military. Alone, it can tell you where you are to within 30 feet. More recently a technique called Differential GPS (DGPS) improved on that resolution by adding ground-based reference stations—increasing accuracy to within 3 feet.

Now, a team from the University of California, Riverside, has developed a technique that augments the regular GPS data with on-board inertial measurements from a sensor. Actually, that’s been tried before, but in the past it’s required large computers to combine the two data streams, rendering it ineffective for use in cars or mobile devices. Instead what the University of California team has done is create a set of new algorithms which, it claims, reduce the complexity of the calculation by several order of magnitude.

Feb 11, 2016

ViaSat plans to launch three satellites to provide 1 terabit per second internet connections to remote areas, aircraft, and maritime vehicles.

ViaSat, a US-based satellite company, has teamed up with Boeing to build three new satellites that will provide high-speed Internet to remote areas around the world. This joint project was announced two days ago. ViaSat is scheduled to launch its satellite ViaSat2 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in just a few months.

These three new satellites, named ViaSat3, will be carrying a total network capacity of a whopping 1 Terabit per second, triple the capacity of ViaSat2. It will be able to deliver 100 Mbps service to remote residential areas in the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Feb 2, 2016

It seems like every day, a video or image emerges that appears to show a UFO near the International Space Station. And it generally — OK, always — turns out not to be a UFO. It’s normally space debris, light reflections from the station windows, an antenna attached to the station, etc.

But wouldn’t it be interesting if someone actually launched a satellite into Earth orbit (illustrated above), with the specific mission of trying to detect and prove unknown objects are actually out there?

They call it “Stash & Deploy,” and the service will leverage the NanoRacks heritage in CubeSat deployment and the capability of Made In Space to provide 3D printing capabilities and deliver – on-demand – satellite manufacturing, assembly, and deployment in the space environment.

The plan calls for a variety of standard and customer-specific satellite components to be “cached” within a satellite deployment vehicle such as the International Space Station, and the components will be “stashed” for rapid manufacture of CubeSats.

Jan 31, 2016

True points and many that I have been sharing on Quantum around its own potential to change everything that we know about technology (devices, internet & networking in general, wireless and satellites, AI, advancements in biotech, security, big data, and singularity itself). The author also highlights many of the same concerns that I have shared around hackers on Quantum breaking through the older digitized platforms and networks; therefore, many companies and governments are exposed as well as consumers who have not adopted Quantum.

Although the author speculates we’re less than 10 yrs for Quantum to be seen in the everyday usage; I believe we’re within 7 yrs.

Within four years quantum computers will have the beating of conventional computers and that will produce a dramatic change in both the technology landscape and in business, according to Professor Jeremy O’Brien from Bristol University.